Need help regarding RAM initialization

[Altera_Forum]

Hello, 

 I am working on a music player project and would like to preload some songs onto a DE2 board and play them back using eg. KEY's on the board. I am very much a beginner so please be patient.    I have the songs available in WAV format and will convert them to PCM. My questions is:   How does one go about initializing RAM? I'd like to preload the RAM with data from the PCM so that I can read them later on. I've taken a look at the MegaWizard RAM Initializer but am clueless as to what the parameters represent (eg. words, width) and how the parameters relate to what I am trying to accomplish. I imagine that I'd probably want to load from a memory initialization file (.mif), but how does one load PCM onto a .mif file?   Thank you in advance.

[Altera_Forum]

Hi,  

 MIF files are just text files which specify memory contents and can be used to intializa the FPGA's internal memory. You can see their format here: http://quartushelp.altera.com/9.1/mergedprojects/reference/glossary/def_mif.htm  So, you'd need to find or write a small program to convert WAV/PCM into .MIF (or .HEX(. That said, the FPGA on the DE2 only has a 52 * 4K RAM, which won't hold much sound.  Thus, if you want to turn the DE2 into a media player, you need to find another strategy.  I suggest either you stream sound data into the DE2 using the USB interface or you load sound data from the SD card reader.

[Altera_Forum]

Thanks for your response rbugalho.  

 My sound files are quite small, relatively speaking. I will nevertheless need to sample at a much lower rate than I had intended. I'm trying to avoid the use of USB or SD card.  I think I have found tools to convert between WAV/PCM and .HEX, so I will try to use that to initialize the memory and go from there.